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Carbelide Nelicanya Sectory 22
Page 04
While there is no necessity for supposing an elevation greater than that required to lay bare a passage for animals back and forth, yet soundings undertaken by the British government have established the fact, that the ocean deepens very gradually away from the shores of the main-land until a depth of six hundred feet is reached, when the shore falls away very suddenly. This is supposed to be the sea-coast of that time. The English Channel would then have existed as the valley of the Seine, and the Rhine have prolonged its flow over the present bed of the North Sea. As the land stood at this height through a large portion of the Glacial Age, it is not at all unreasonable to suppose that primitive tribes hunted back and forth along these valleys, and so doubtless many convincing proofs of their presence at that early day lie buried underneath the waves of the sea. In like manner, at the south, we know that elephants, lions, and hyenas passed freely from Africa to Spain, Italy, and the Island of Crete,<7> and, consequently, the Mediterranean Sea must have been bridged in one or two places at least.
But with all their prowess and skill as naval combatants, and their hardihood as mountaineers, the Cilicians lacked one thing which is very essential in every nation to an honorable military fame. They had no poets or historians of their own, so that the story of their deeds had to be told to posterity by their enemies. If they had been able to narrate their own exploits, they would have figured, perhaps, upon the page of history as a small but brave and efficient maritime power, pursuing for many years a glorious career of conquest, and acquiring imperishable renown by their enterprise and success. As it was, the Romans, their enemies, described their deeds and gave them their designation. They called them robbers and pirates; and robbers and pirates they must forever remain.
I have never seen Mendelssohn, but there is a fresco of him on the terrace, or open-air dining-room, of an inn at Chiavenna. He is not called Mendelssohn, but I knew him by his legs. He is in the costume of a dandy of some five-and-forty years ago, is smoking a cigar, and appears to be making an offer of marriage to his cook. Beethoven both my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones and I have had the good fortune to meet; he is an engineer now, and does not know one note from another; he has quite lost his deafness, is married, and is, of course, a little squat man with the same refractory hair that he always had. It was very interesting to watch him, and Jones remarked that before the end of dinner he had become positively posthumous. One morning I was told the Beethovens were going away, and before long I met their two heavy boxes being carried down the stairs. The boxes were so squab and like their owners, that I half thought for a moment that they were inside, and should hardly have been surprised to see them spring up like a couple of Jacks-in-thebox. "Sono indentro?" said I, with a frown of wonder, pointing to the boxes. The porters knew what I meant, and laughed. But there is no end to the list of people whom I have been able to recognise, and before I had got through it myself, I found I had walked some distance, and had involuntarily paused in front of a second-hand bookstall.
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